Podcast appearances and mentions of tommy flowers

Get your buzzers ready. We get competitive this week. Can you beat Alex in spotting the links to past episodes? Who'd have thought that Gladdie Park could be so well connected? And just around the corner was a unassuming building with a big story to hide. Partly the underground bunker, and partly their contribution to code breaking in WW2. Bletchley Park was the main centre for British codebreaking. Telecoms engineer Tommy Flowers and his team at Dollis Hill provided the equipment to break the most secret of all the codes. The Lorenz code of the Gerheimschreiber machines used by German high command. And if anyone doesn't know what Taskmaster is, where have you been? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

February 2023  The breaking of the German Lorenz cipher system was one of BP's most complex technical achievements. This work is often associated with Tommy Flowers from the GPO, however Flowers' work, and the wider mechanisation of the breaking of TUNNY was overseen by a Cambridge mathematician who came to BP only reluctantly in 1942; Professor Max Newman.  To mark the 80th anniversary of the opening of Bletchley Park's 'Newmanry' in February 1943, in this ‘It Happened Here' episode, we examine the story of Newman and his crucial role in the breaking of Lorenz. We are joined by Bletchley Park's Research Historian Dr David Kenyon to tell us more. Special thanks to Dr Ben Thomson for voicing our archival documents. Image: ©Crown. Reproduced by kind permission, Director, GCHQ #BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, # Colossus,

"折斷！ - 機器人電話，出租車黑客，微生物採礦，愚蠢的步行，翹曲驅動器 簡而言之，您的每日技術新聞。 歡迎來到快照！ 閃回：早在1905年12月22日，巨像的設計師湯米·弗洛斯（Tommy Flowers）是世界上第一台電子可編程計算機的設計師（在這裡閱讀更多。" "啟動AD- #TheMummichogBlogoFmalta Amazon Top和Flash Deals（會員鏈接 - 如果您通過以下鏈接購買，您將支持我們的翻譯）-https：//amzn.to/3feogyg 僅在一次搜索中比較所有頂級旅行網站，以在酒店庫存的最佳酒店交易中找到世界上最佳酒店價格比較網站。 （會員鏈接 - 如果您通過以下鏈接購買，您將支持我們的翻譯）-https：//www.hotelscombined.com/?a_aid=20558 “因此，無論您希望別人對您做什麼，也對他們做，因為這是法律和先知。”“ #Jesus #Catholic。 “從受孕的時刻，必須絕對尊重和保護人類的生活。從他生存的第一刻起，必須將一個人承認為擁有一個人的權利 - 其中每種無辜者都是無辜的權利。”天主教教堂的教理2270。 墮胎殺死了兩次。它殺死了嬰兒的身體，並殺死了母親的科學。墮胎是深刻的反婦女。它的受害者中有三個季節是女性：一半的嬰兒和所有母親。 流暢的馬耳他無線電是馬耳他的第一號數字廣播電台，演奏您的輕鬆最愛 - Smooth提供了“無混亂”的混音，吸引了35-59個核心觀眾，提供柔和的成人現代經典。我們操作一個流行曲目的播放列表，並定期更新。 https://smooth.com.mt/listen/ 馬耳他是一顆地中海寶石，等待被發現。馬耳他擁有文化和歷史，娛樂和放鬆，冒險和興奮的獨特結合，也是出國留學的理想之地。實際上，它擁有世界上最優秀的學習機構。 -https：//www.visitmalta.com/ 關注電報：https：//t.me/themummichogblogdotcom Tumblr：https：//www.tumblr.com/themummichogblogofmalta blogspot：https：//themummichogblogofmalta.blogspot.com/ 論壇：https：//groups.google.com/g/themummichogblog Facebook：https：//www.facebook.com/groups/chinesecommunitymalta 結束廣告" "） 獎勵閃回：1882年12月22日，第一個電動聖誕樹燈（在這裡閱讀更多）。 您需要聽到這個消息。 FCC提議打破紀錄的3億美元針對Robocaller 好的。我實際上希望更多。 根據BleepingComputer： ”“該機器人計劃在​​2021年的三個月範圍內，在2021年的三個月範圍內提出了超過50億個機器人通話，使用預先錄製的語音電話向消費者呼籲與“保修專家”交談，以擴展或恢復他們的``保修專家''汽車的保修。” FCC說。 “ FCC執法局的調查發現，Cox/Jones Enterprise顯然將大約5,187,677,000個電話撥到了550,138,650個無線和住宅電話，從1月至2021年3月至2021年3月，使用1,051,461個獨特的Caller I.D.在那三個月的時間裡。 文章中的更多信息，但看起來FCC實際上正在改變呼叫的數量，因此希望它能繼續下去。 在BleepingComputer上了解更多信息。 還有另一件事... 兩名男子因肯尼迪機場出租車計劃被捕 好的。 根據SecurityWeek： “在肯尼迪國際機場，出租車必須在一個控股地上等待，然後按照他們到達的順序派出碼頭。出租車可能需要等待幾個小時才能被派遣。 但是，阿巴耶夫（Abayev）和萊曼（Leyman）入侵了出租車派遣系統，可以操縱派出出租車的順序，從而使某些出租車跳過線路。加入該計劃的出租車司機每次跳過了10美元。 據稱，犯罪嫌疑人在俄羅斯居住在俄羅斯的黑客幫助者的幫助下，犯罪嫌疑人。網絡犯罪行動始於2019年，黑客嘗試包括賄賂某人使用閃存驅動器將惡意軟件部署到調度系統計算機上，通過Wi-Fi攻擊獲得未經授權的對系統的訪問，並竊取連接到調度系統的平板電腦。” 不會從系統中刪除損壞的驅動程序，但至少是某種東西。 在SecurityWeek中了解更多信息。 但是，世界上還有更多的事情。 微生物採礦可以幫助殖民月球和火星 這很酷。 根據有趣的工程： “加利福尼亞大學的工程師歐文說，微生物可以幫助殖民月球和火星。受到藍細菌的啟發，這些藍細菌從智利阿塔卡馬沙漠中獲取岩石的營養素，他們也將這些發現視為在大規模3D印刷中採用微生物的一步或適用於土木工程在挑戰地點（例如月球和火星）的規模的添加劑製造。 如大學所述，高分辨率電子顯微鏡和尖端的光譜成像方法被UC Irvine和Johns Hopkins University材料科學與工程系的研究人員使用和人造納米陶瓷。” 我喜歡幾乎沒有微生物為我們做很多事情的想法。我擔心的是，它並不像科幻小說那樣容易……您讓像火星上那樣鬆散的東西何時停止？ 在有趣的工程上了解更多信息。 這很奇怪... 約翰·克萊斯（John Cleese 這是有趣的研究。 根據ARS Technica： “像約翰·克萊斯（John Cleese）的角色一樣，在蒙蒂·派頓（Monty Python）著名的“愚蠢的步行部”中的蒂巴格先生（Teabag）先生，滑雪者需要比普通步態的能量消耗更多，因為該運動效率低下。在《英國醫學雜誌》上。實際上，像Teabag先生一樣每天只有11分鐘的步行時間，相當於每週進行75分鐘的激烈體育鍛煉，這是一種新穎的手段來促進心血管健身。 作者寫道：“半個世紀前，[愚蠢的步行部]滑雪者可能不知不覺地觸及了一種強大的方法來增強成年人的心血管健身。” “如果在1970年代初採用了一項促進效率低下運動的舉措，我們現在可能生活在一個更健康的社會中。” BMJ的聖誕節問題通常更輕鬆，儘管該期刊堅持認為，其中發表的論文仍然“遵守新穎性的高標準，方法論嚴格，報告透明度和適用於常規問題的可讀性。” 本文中的更多詳細信息，如果您對熱量支出的詳細信息感興趣，等等。 在ARS Technica了解更多信息。 另一個很酷的... 而且你不知道這一點。 面部識別技術從無線電城音樂廳啟動律師 對技術的另一個濫用... 根據Extremetech： “今天到處都有面部識別技術，從機場到口袋裡的電話。您可能不會期望遇到的一個地方是一個受歡迎的音樂會場地，例如紐約無線電城市音樂廳。但是，麥迪遜廣場花園娛樂公司（Madison Square Garden Entertainment）該設施和其他設施最近使用面部識別來挑出並從其著名的火箭彈中彈出一名婦女。她的犯罪？成為錯誤的律師事務所的律師……。 甚至在與康隆交談之前，安全都知道她的名字，更重要的是她的雇主。康隆（Conlon）是新澤西州律師事務所戴維斯（Davis），薩佩斯坦（Saperstein）和薩洛蒙（Salomon）的合夥人，該公司曾對MSG Entertainment擁有的一家餐廳進行了人身傷害訴訟已有數年。事實證明，MSG Entertainment對禁止在從事訴訟的公司工作的律師制定鮮為人知的政策。因此，康隆與她的女兒分開，被迫在外面等待。” 除了技術問題外，繼續升級這樣的情況似乎是一個壞主意。律師是否會通過參加演出來竊取秘密？聽到為什麼要採取這樣的措施才能開始，這將很有趣。 在Extremetech上了解更多信息。 最後的音符... 世界上最大的激光之一可用於檢測外星扭曲驅動器 有趣的。 根據現場科學： “當具有質量質量的物體移動太空時，引力波蕩漾著。較大的物體（例如行星，中子星或黑洞）會產生更突出的引力波。這些時空漣漪在2015年首次直接檢測到這些時空漣漪，但是從那時起，科學家就擁有了在我們的宇宙海岸圈圈時發現海浪的情況變得更好了。現在，12月5日發布給預印度數據庫ARXIV的新計算表明，總部位於美國的激光干涉儀重力儀重力波天文台（Ligo）可以超出這些常規來源作者說，時空的漣漪。巨大的外星航天器高速行駛，或者被經線驅動器推動，也會產生明顯的振動。” 如果我們找到具有經線驅動器的人，我們應該找出如何構建自己的。 :) 在現場科學上了解更多信息。 今天最有趣的故事是什麼？在下面的民意調查中投票。 另外，關注Snap！或查看以前的版本，以了解重要和娛樂技術和科學新聞的知識。 閱讀電子郵件通知並想在民意調查中投票還是與他人聊天？直接進入此快照！的社區主題，並加入對話。 https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2472011-snap-robocallers-taxi-hacking-microbial-microbial-mining-mining-silly-walk-walk-wark-warp-drives?utm_campaign=digaign＆campaign＆campaign＆utm_medium = Email = Email = Email＆utm_sourpecce = digigest＆utmeetmetmetmetmecicepic+topicic = topicic = topicic = topiciccic

The Industrial Revolution gave us the rise of factories all over the world in the 1800s. Life was moving faster and we were engineering complex solutions to mass produce items. And many expanded from there to engineer complex solutions for simple problems. Cartoonist Heath Robinson harnessed the reaction from normal humans to this changing world in the forms of cartoons and illustrations of elaborate machines meant to accomplish simple tasks. These became known as “Heath Robinson contraptions” and were a reaction to the changing and increasingly complicated world order as much as anything. Just think of the rapidly evolving financial markets as one sign of the times! Following World War I, other cartoonists made similar cartoons. Like Rube Goldberg, giving us the concept of Rube Goldberg machines in the US. And the very idea of breaking down simple operations into Boolean logic from those who didn't understand the “why” would have seemed preposterous. I mean a wheel with 60 teeth or a complex series of switches and relays to achieve the same result? And yet with flip-flop circuits one would be able to process infinitely faster than it would take that wheel to turn with any semblance of precision. The Industrial Revolution of our data was to come. And yet we were coming to a place in the world where we were just waking up to the reality of moving from analog to digital as Robinson passed away in 1944 with a series of electromechanical computers named after Robinson and then The Colossus. These came just one year after Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, two giants in the early history of computers, met at Bell Labs. And a huge step in that transition was a paper by Alan Turing in 1936 called "On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” This would become the basis for a programmable computing machine concept and so before the war, Alan Turing had published papers about the computability of problems using what we now call a Turing machine - or recipes. Some of the work on that paper was inspired by Max Newman, who helped Turing go off to Princeton to work on all the maths, where Turing would get a PhD in 1938. He returned home and started working part-time at the Government Code and Cypher school during the pre-war buildup. Hitler invaded Poland the next year, sparking World War II. The Poles had gotten pretty good with codebreaking, being situated right between world powers Germany and Russia and their ability to see troop movements through decrypted communications was one way they were able to keep forces in optimal locations. And yet the Germans got in there. The Germans had built a machine called the Enigma that also allowed their Navy to encrypt communications. Unable to track their movements, Allied forces were playing a cat and mouse game and not doing very well at it. Turing came up with a new way of decrypting the messages and that went into a new version of the Polish Bomba. Later that year, the UK declared war on Germany. Turing's work resulted in a lot of other advances in cryptanalysis throughout the war. But he also brought home the idea of an electromechanical machine to break those codes - almost as though he'd written a paper on building machines to do such things years before. The Germans had given away a key to decrypt communications accidentally in 1941 and the codebreakers at Bletchley Park got to work on breaking the machines that used the Lorenz Cipher in new and interesting ways. The work had reduced the amount of losses - but they needed more people. It was time intensive to go through the possible wheel positions or guess at them, and every week meant lives lost. Or they needed more automation of people tasks… So they looked to automate the process. Turing and the others wrote to Churchill directly. Churchill started his memo to General Ismay with “ACTION THIS DAY” and so they were able to get more bombes up and running. Bill Tutte and the codebreakers worked out the logic to process the work done by hand. The same number of codebreakers were able to a ton more work. The first pass was a device with uniselectors and relays. Frank Morrell did the engineering design to process the logic. And so we got the alpha test of an automation machine they called the Tunny. The start positions were plugged in by hand and it could still take weeks to decipher messages. Max Newman, Turing's former advisor and mentor, got tapped to work on the project and Turing was able to take the work of Polish code breakers and others and add sequential conditional probability to guess at the settings of the 12 wheels of an Enigma machine and thus get to the point they could decipher messages coming out of the German navy on paper. No written records indicate that Turing was involved much in the project beyond that. Max Newman developed the specs, heavily influenced by Turing's previous work. They got to work on an electro-mechanical device we now call the Heath Robinson. They needed to be able to store data. They used paper tape - which could process a thousand characters per second using photocell readers - but there were two and they had to run concurrently. Tape would rip and two tapes running concurrently meant a lot might rip. Charles Wynn-Williams was a brilliant physicist who worked with electric waves since the late 1920s at Trinity College, Cambridge and was recruited from a project helping to develop RADAR because he'd specifically worked on electronic counters at Cambridge. That work went into the counting unit, counting how many times a function returned a true result. As we saw with Bell Labs, the telephone engineers were looking for ways to leverage switching electronics to automate processes for the telephone exchange. Turing recommended they bring in telephone engineer Tommy Flowers to design the Combining unit, which used vacuum tubes to implement Boolean logic - much as the paper Shannon wrote in 1936 that he gave Turing over tea at Bell labs earlier 1943. It's likely Turing would have also heard of the calculator George Stibitz of Bell Labs built out of relay switches all the way back in 1937. Slow but more reliable than the vacuum tubes of the era. And it's likely he influenced those he came to help by collaborating on encrypted voice traffic and likely other projects as much if not more. Inspiration is often best found at the intersectionality between ideas and cultures. Flowers looked to use vacuum tubes where the wheel patterns were produced. This gave one less set of paper tapes and infinitely more reliability. And a faster result. The programs were stored but they were programmable. Input was made using the shift registers from the paper tape and thyratron rings that simulated the bitstream for the wheels. There was a master control unit that handled the timing between the clock, signals, readouts, and printing. It didn't predate the Von Neumann architecture. But it didn't not. The switch panel had a group of switches used to define the algorithm being used with a plug-board defining conditions. The combination provided billions of combinations for logic processing. Vacuum tube valves were still unstable but they rarely blew when on, it was the switching process. So if they could have the logic gates flow through a known set of wheel settings the new computer would be more stable. Just one thing - they needed 1,500 valves! This thing would be huge! And so the Colossus Mark 1 was approved by W.G. Radley in 1943. It took 50 people 11 months to build and was able to compute wheel settings for ciphered message tapes. Computers automating productivity at its finest. The switches and plugs could be repositioned and so not only was Colossus able get messages decrypted in hours but could be reprogrammed to do other tasks. Others joined and they got the character reading up to almost 10,000 characters a second. They improved on the design yet again by adding shift registers and got over four times the speeds. It could now process 25,000 characters per second. One of the best uses was to confirm that Hitler got tricked into thinking the attack at Normandy at D-Day would happen elsewhere. And so the invasion of Normandy was safe to proceed. But the ability to reprogram made it a mostly universal computing machine - proving the Turing machine concept and fulfilling the dreams of Charles Babbage a hundred years earlier. And so the war ended in 1945. After the war, The Colossus machines were destroyed - except the two sent to British GHCQ where they ran until 1960. So the simple story of Colossus is that it was a series of computers built in England from 1943 to 1945, at the heart of World War II. The purpose: cryptanalysis - or code breaking. Turing went on to work on the Automatic Computing Engine at the National Physical Laboratory after the war and wrote a paper on the ACE - but while they were off to a quick start in computing in England having the humans who knew the things, they were slow to document given that their wartime work was classified. ENIAC came along in 1946 as did the development of Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener. That same year Max Newman wrote to John Von Neumann (Wiener's friend) about building a computer in England. He founded the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at Victory University of Manchester, got Turing out to help and built the Manchester Baby, along with Frederic Williams and Thomas Kilburn. In 1946 Newman would also decline becoming Sir Newman when he rejected becoming an OBE, or Officer of the Order of the British Empire, over the treatment of his protege Turing not being offered the same. That's leadership. They'd go on to collaborate on the Manchester Mark I and Ferranti Mark I. Turing would work on furthering computing until his death in 1954, from taking cyanide after going through years of forced estrogen treatments for being a homosexual. He has since been pardoned post Following the war, Flowers tried to get a loan to start a computer company - but the very idea was ludicrous and he was denied. He retired from the Post Office Research Station after spearheading the move of the phone exchange to an electric, or what we might think of as a computerized exchange. Over the next decade, the work from Claude Shannon and other mathematicians would perfect the implementation of Boolean logic in computers. Von Neumann only ever mentioned Shannon and Turing in his seminal 1958 paper called The Computer And The Brain. While classified by the British government the work on Colossus was likely known to Von Neumann, who will get his own episode soon - but suffice it to say was a physicist turned computer scientist and worked on ENIAC to help study and develop atom bombs - and who codified the von Neumann architecture. We did a whole episode on Turing and another on Shannon, and we have mentioned the 1945 article As We May Think where Vannevar Bush predicted and inspired the next couple generations of computer scientists following the advancements in computing around the world during the war. He too would have likely known of the work on Colossus at Bletchley Park. Maybe not the specifics but he certainly knew of ENIAC - which unlike Colossus was run through a serious public relations machine. There are a lot of heroes to this story. The brave men and women who worked tirelessly to break, decipher, and analyze the cryptography. The engineers who pulled it off. The mathematicians who sparked the idea. The arrival of the computer was almost deterministic. We had work on the Atanasoff-Berry Computer at Iowa State, work at Bell Labs, Norbert Wiener's work on anti-aircraft guns at MIT during the war, Konrad Zuse's Z3, Colossus, and other mechanical and electromechanical devices leading up to it. But deterministic doesn't mean lacking inspiration. And what is the source of inspiration and when mixed with perspiration - innovation? There were brilliant minds in mathematics, like Turing. Brilliant physicists like Wynn-Williams. Great engineers like Flowers. That intersection between disciplines is the wellspring of many an innovation. Equally as important, then there's a leader who can take the ideas, find people who align with a mission, and help clear roadblocks. People like Newman. When they have domain expertise and knowledge - and are able to recruit and keep their teams inspired, they can change the world. And then there are people with purse strings who see the brilliance and can see a few moves ahead on the chessboard - like Churchill. They make things happen. And finally, there are the legions who carried on the work in theoretical, practical, and in the pure sciences. People who continue the collaboration between disciplines, iterate, and bring products to ever growing markets. People who continue to fund those innovations. It can be argued that our intrepid heroes in this story helped win a war - but that the generations who followed, by connecting humanity and bringing productivity gains to help free our minds to solve bigger and bigger problems will hopefully some day end war. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We hope to cover your contributions. Drop us a line and let us know how we can. And thank you so much for listening. We are so, so lucky to have you.

William talks to the learning expert, Donald Clark, about the history of learning theory and about the best way to teach and learn history.Questions covered:Where does Donald's interest in history come from?How has the way in which we learn changed over time?Why is the invention of writing the “Big Bang” moment of collective learning?Why is the invention of binary or computer language such an important moment in the development of learning?Is collective learning our unique trait?How did technology enable collective learning?Who are the experts in the field of learning?Does AI or machine learning give us any insight into human learning?Would it be possible to have Wikipedia in our heads?Who are the people who have changed our perceptions of learning?What are the major strands in learning theory?Have we arrived at a more scientific approach to understanding learning?What is the connection between learning and teaching?To what extent can the teacher be held responsible for the student's learning?Does critical thinking hold up as an abstract concept?How should we teach history if learning theories are incorporated?Why is it important to make history teaching more concrete?How should history teachers think about online learning design?Why should we let go of Bloom's taxonomy?Donald's advice to learn more effectively...You might want to read up on the following people: James Hutton, David C Geary, Daniel Kahneman, James Mark Baldwin, Tommy Flowers, Robin Dunbar, Douglas Engelbart, Clay Shirky, Donald Hebb, Herman Ebbinghaus, Edward Tolman, Albert Bandura, Henry Roediger, Jeffrey D Karpicke, Robert A Bjork, Barak Rosenshine, Robert Marzano, John Hattie, Paul Black and Dylan William.Or just visit Donald's blog here. He is also on twitter @DonaldClark Please let us know what you thought about this episode at highschoolhistoryrecap@gmail.com or find us on twitter: William and Colin.Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=Q8KGSAT37YCPA&source=url)

This veteran special is based on Peter's Imperial War Museum interview with the remarkable Tommy Flowers - the man who built the Colossus computer that cracked the German codes in the Second World War. Tommy Flowers is a different type of hero, and this episode includes excerpts from the interview with the man himself. Presenters: Peter Hart and Gary Bain Publisher: Mat McLachlan Producer: Jess Stebnicki For more great history content, visit www.LivingHistoryTV.com, or subscribe to our YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/c/LivingHistoryTV Peter Hart's Military History is a Living History production.

How Based On A True Story is The Imitation Game?Rob and his little brother Tim break the code or some other such pun on The Imitation Game! How true to life is the story of Alan Turing and his time at Bletchley Park breaking the Nazi enigma code and saving the world?Where to watch The Imitation Game: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/the-imitation-gameAlan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film the Imitation Game - Updated Edition (Revised) by Andrew Hodges: https://bookshop.org/a/4479/9780691164724The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptographyby Simon Singh: https://bookshop.org/a/4479/9780385495325Further Reading / Watching:Two part video explaining how Enigma worked:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2_Q9FoD-oQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4V2bpZlqx8More about Enigma and Turing:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2NWPG2gB_Ahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj_7Jc1mS9kInfo about Welchman and traffic analysis:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXZNayEPFKcA lot of similar info from the videos above but at 3:20 there's a good shot of the Enigma rotors taken out of the machine:https://youtu.be/ASfAPOiq_eQ?t=201 Good recap of how BOATS:https://slate.com/culture/2014/12/the-imitation-game-fact-vs-fiction-how-true-the-new-movie-is-to-alan-turings-real-life-story.html5 min video explaining the basics of Turing Machines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNRDvLACg5QVideos on Colossus, the computer Tommy Flowers designed that broke the harder Lorenz cipher:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HH-asvLAj4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cDeG3hyraAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knXWMjIA59c

Today we're going to cover the complicated legacy of Konrad Zuse.  Konrad Zuse is one of the biggest pioneers in early computing that relatively few have heard about. We tend to celebrate those who lived and worked in Allied countries in the World War II era. But Zuse had been born in Berlin in 1910. He worked in isolation during those early days, building his historic Z1 computer at 26 years old in his parents living room. It was 1936.  That computer was a mechanical computer and he was really more of a guru when it came to mechanical and electromechanical computing. Mechanical computing was a lot like watch-making, with gears, and automations. There was art in it, and Zuse had been an artist early on in life.  This was the first computer that really contained every part of what we would today think of a modern computer. It had a central processing control unit. It had memory. It had input through punched tape that could be used to program it. It even had floating point logic. It had an electric motor that ran at 1 hertz.  This design would live inside future computers that he built, but was destroyed in 1943 during air raids, and would be lost to history until Zuse built a replica in 1989.  He started building the Z2 in 1940. This used the same memory as the Z1 (64 words) but had 600 relays that allowed him to get up to 5 hertz. He'd also speed up calculations based on those relays, but the power required would jump up to a thousand watts. He would hand it over to the German DVL, now the German Aerospace Center. If there are Nazis on the moon, his computers likely put them there.  And this is really where the German authorities stepped in and, as with in the US, began funding efforts in technological advancement. They saw the value of modeling all the maths on these behemoths. They ponied up the cash to build the Z3. And this turned out to ironically be the first Turing-complete computer. He'd continue 22-bit word lengths and run at 5 hertz. But this device would have 2,600 relays and would help to solve wing flutter problems and other complicated aerodynamic mathematical mysteries. The machine also used Boolean algebra, a concept brought into computing independently by Claude Shannon in the US. It was finished in 1941, two years before Tommy Flowers finished the Colossus and 1 year before the Atanasoff-Berry Computer was built. And 7 years before ENIAC. And this baby was fast. Those relays crunched multiplication problems in 3 seconds. Suddenly you could calculate square roots in no time. But the German war effort was more focused on mechanical computing and this breakthrough was never considered critical to the war effort. Still, it was destroyed by allied air raids, just as its younger siblings had been.  The war had gone from 1939 to 1945, the year he married Gisela and his first child was born. He would finish building the Z4 days before the end of the war and met Alan Turing in 1947. He'd found Zuse KG in 1949. The Germans were emerging from a post-wartime depression and normalizing relations with the rest of Europe. The Z4 would finally go into production in Zurich in 1950. His team was now up to a couple dozen people and he was getting known. With electronics getting better and faster and better known, he was able to bring in specialists and with 2,500 relays - now 21 step-wise relays. - to get up to 40 hertz. And to under complicate something from a book I read, no Apple was not the first company to hook a keyboard up to a computer, the Zs did it in the 50s as they were now using a typewriter to help program the computer. OK, fine, ENIAC did it in 1946… But can you imagine hooking a keyboard up to a device rather than just tapping on the screen?!?! Archaic! For two years, the Z4 was the only digital computer in all of Europe. But that was all about to change. They would refine the design and build the Z5, delivering it to Leitz GMBH in 1953. The Americans tried to recruit him to join their growing cache of computer scientists by sending Douglas Buck and others out. But he stayed on in Germany.  They would tinker with the designs and by 1955 came the Z11, shipping in 1957. This would be the first computer they produced multiple of in an almost assembly line building 48 and gave them enough money to build their next big success, the Z22. This was his seventh and would use vacuum tubes. And actually had an ALGOL 58 compiler. If you can believe it, the  University of Applied Sciences, Karlsruhe still has one running! It added a rudimentary form of water cooling, teletype, drum memory, and core memory. They were now part of the computing mainstream.  And in 1961 they would go transistorized with the Z23. Ferrite memory. 150 kilohertz, Algol 60. This was on par with anything being built in the world. Transistors and diodes. They'd sell nearly 100 of them over the next few years. They would even have Z25 and Z26 variants. The Z31 would ship in 1963. They would make it to the Z43.  But the company would run into financial problems and be sold to Siemens in 1967, who had gotten into computing in the 1950s. Being able to focus on something other than running a company prompted Zuse to write Calculating Space, effectively positing that the universe is a computational structure, now known as digital physics. He wasn't weird, you're weird. OK, he was…  e was never a Nazi, but he did build machines that could have helped their effort.  You can trace the history of the mainframe era from gears to relays to tubes to transistors in his machines. IBM and other companies licensed his patents. And many advances were almost validated by him independently discovering them, like the use of Boolean algebra in computing. But to some degree he was a German in a lost era of history, often something that falls to the losers in a war.  So Konrad Zuse, thank you for one of the few clean timelines. It was a fun romp. I hope you have a lovely place in history, however complicated it may be. And thank you listeners, for tuning in to this episode of the history of computing podcast. We are so lucky to have you stop by. I hope you have a lovely and quite uncomplicated day! 

July 2019    Most people now know of the work carried out by Tommy Flowers and his team that ultimately led to the design and construction of ‘Colossus’, the world’s first large-scale electronic digital computer. Flowers worked for the General Post Office at their Research Station at Dollis Hill but that work was just one part of the connection between the GPO and the Codebreakers at Bletchley Park.    With the opening this year of our new exhibition, D-Day: Interception, Intelligence, Invasion, that link with the modern GPO, British Telecom now called BT, continues.   In this episode our research historian, Dr David Kenyon, sat down with the Head of Heritage and Archives for BT, David Hay, to talk about our shared history.   Also in this episode we bring you something very special indeed. In 1981 at the modern equivalent of Dollis Hill, Adastral Park, Tommy Flowers and some of his original team gave a talk about their wartime work and thanks to BT we can bring you highlights of that reunion.     BT is the Sole and Exclusive Corporate Partner of the restoration of Teleprinter Building and the Exclusive and Sole Partner of the Exhibition.   Image: ©BT ref TCB 638/RES 23706-05 Tommy Flowers & Team 1981 reunion     #BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, #DDay75, #BT

Tommy Flowers was a very important British scientist and engineer during the first half of the 20th century. Not only did he do essential work in cracking secret German codes during World War II, he is usually credited with inventing (and building) the world’s first programmable electronic computer, the Colossus. He’s not as famous as Alan Turing, but he’s at least as important to history. Listen to our Man Crush Monday!

Pigeon whistles, new fiction, Tommy Flowers, raw materials + Jonathan Holder and the Good Thinking

Tommy Flowers was a very important British scientist and engineer during the first half of the 20th century. Not only did he do essential work in cracking secret German codes during World War II, he is usually credited with inventing (and building) the world’s first programmable electronic computer, the Colossus. He’s not as famous as Alan Turing, but he’s at least as important to history. Listen to our Man Crush Monday!

On Episode 37 Of "Your Program Is Your Ticket" My Guest Is Enterprising Actor/Producer David Gow – Starring In Terrence McNally's “Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone”. We Discuss The Dynamic Audience Reaction To The Show And David Provides Some Wonderful Advice To Those Fresh Out Of College And Looking To Succeed In The Theater! Plus I Give A Little Background On The Incomparable Terrence McNally (Did You Know He Taught John Steinbeck's Sons During A Trip Around The World)! And I Give A Strong (Like – WOW!) Recommendation To Sarah DeLappe's “The Wolves” – Now Playing At Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theatre! (Musical Intro And Outro By The Phenomenal North Coast, NYC) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

September 2015 On 18 October the BBC’s Security Correspondent, Gordon Corera, will give a talk at Bletchley Park about his new book which traces the intertwined history of computing and espionage, Intercept – The Secret History of Computers and Spies. The computer was born to spy. Under the intense pressure of the Second World War and in the confines of Bletchley Park, the work of men like Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers led to the birth of the computing age. It was a breakthrough that helped win the war and which cemented the importance of signals intelligence and also a close alliance between the US and UK. In the following decades, computers transformed espionage from Cold War spy hunting and providing advance warning of nuclear war through to today’s data driven pursuit of terrorists and industrial scale cyber-espionage against corporations. Gordon Corera reveals for the first time how – beginning at Bletchley - the history of computers has been shaped by spying and in turn how spying has been changed by computers. He will look at the legacy of Bletchley and how it matters for us all. He told the Bletchley Park Podcast how a book about technology turned out to be a book about people. Tickets are available from the Bletchley Park online shop https://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/shop/p.rhtm/130872/908465-Bletchley_Park_Presents__Gordon_Corera_Sunday_18_October.html #BPark, #Bletchleypark, #Enigma, #History

Author Grady Booch provides an audio recording of his On Computing column, in which he discusses how although we live in a world of unprecedented complexity and astonishing possibility, we should never forget our past, for those who came before us in computing enabled those possibilities. From IEEE Software's January/February 2016 issue: http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/so/2016/01/index.html. Visit IEEE Software: http://www.computer.org/software.

September 2014 Professor Jack Copeland talks about ‘one of his greatest heroes’ Tommy Flowers, from his early life & career leading to working with the Bletchley Park Codebreakers. Jack explains the task faced when in mid-1942 the German High Command started to use a new encryption device, the Lorenz SZ40/42. The attack on Tunny, as it was dubbed by GC&CS, would involve some of the greatest codebreakers we had, Alan Turing, Bill Tutte & Max Newman. It would culminate in Tommy’s greatest achievement, the invention of Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic digital computer. The world would never be the same again. This talk was recorded at last year’s sell-out day of talks, Codebreakers’ Legacy. If you would like to attend a similar event in the Bletchley Park Presents series, then please go to http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/ & look in the What’s On section. A rebuild of Colossus can be seen at The National Museum of Computing, a separate site on the grounds of Bletchley Park. Picture: ©shaunarmstrong/mubsta.com #BPark, #BletchleyPark, #Enigma, #Tunny, #WW2, #codebreaker, #mcfontaine, #TNMOC

February 2013 In this episode we have the full interview with Captain Jerry Roberts, who was today (28/02/13) awarded an MBE by Her Majesty The Queen in honour of his 4 year campaign for more recognition for Alan Turing, Bill Tutte and Tommy Flowers. Jerry shares with us what it was like to work in The Testery breaking coded messages from Hitler, his memories of “a great man” Bill Tutte, working as a War Crimes Investigator and setting up the first Marketing company in post war South America. Captain Roberts was one of four founding members of the Testery, named after its leader, Ralph Tester. This team was tasked with breaking Germany’s highest-level cipher system, Lorenz, known by the Codebreakers as Tunny. Captain Roberts worked in the Testery from its inception in October 1941, after Bill Tutte made the first break into the Lorenz system, until the end of the war in 1945. Read Katherine Lynch’s blog about Jerry’s visit to the palace http://bletchleypark.org.uk/news/docview.rhtm/686548 #Bletchleypark, #BPark, #Turing, #wonder88, #Tunny, #MBE

February 2013 This month we talk to Captain Jerry Roberts about being awarded an MBE and his 4 year campaign for more recognition for Alan Turing, Bill Tutte and Tommy Flowers.  We have an update from CEO Iain Standen on the Heritage Lottery Funded restoration programme. Also, an exclusive interview with another Bletchley Park Veteran Nancy Jackson, who worked in the Newmanry, the section led by Alan Turing’s friend and mentor Max Newman. A message from mcfontaine This month’s episode has been late due to the death of my step-dad, Mick Chalkley.  There was a really nice connection for me between Bletchley Park and Mick as during World War 2 he served in the Fleet Air Arm. A large part of which was on escort duty on amongst others, the Russian and Malta convoys. I explained to him the work that Bletchley Park did during the war, how by reading U-Boat Enigma traffic they could re-route convoys away from attack. This was something he didn’t know and like me, had no doubt that they must have helped to keep him safe and to live through the war. This episode is dedicated to his memory. Image: ©shaunarmstrong/mubsta.com #BPark, #JerryRoberts, #Tunny, #HLF